Sin and Hypocrisy

Sin and Hypocrisy

Sin in a Violent Christian World

Renaissance Italy can look paradoxical: rulers swore sacred oaths, believed in hell, and still betrayed allies, massacred enemies, lent money at interest, fought for honor, and filled politics with calculated violence. The contradiction was real, but it did not always feel impossible to the people living inside it.

Ada Palmer’s key point is that Christianity in Machiavelli’s world did not usually imagine society as a community of pure people who obeyed the rules all the time. The expectation was almost the opposite: everyone sins constantly. People envy, lust, lie, rage, and sometimes kill. The religious drama comes afterward, through fear, repentance, penance, confession, and the hope of forgiveness.

Dante’s Harsh Reminder

Paolo and Francesca swept among the lustful souls in Dante’s hell, emphasizing that tragic romance receives no exemption from judgment.
A historical illustration of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s Inferno directly supports the section’s point that Dante placed emotionally sympathetic, admired lovers among the damned to expose hypocrisy about sin."Amor," by Davide Taviani BY-SA

Dante’s Inferno pressed hard on this contradiction. He filled hell with Florentines, including people his society admired and people he personally respected. His bitter joke about Florence being “a city famous in hell” attacked the hypocrisy of a Christian city whose citizens kept doing what their own religion condemned.

One famous example is Paolo and Francesca, lovers from a widely admired romantic tragedy. Their story had the emotional appeal of a doomed love legend, but Dante placed them among the lustful in hell because they committed adultery. The shock was the point: if the religion is true, then beloved stories and charming sinners do not get a special exemption.

Dante’s message was stern: do not treat sin as socially acceptable just because everyone does it. He forced readers to imagine their ordinary compromises as eternally serious.

A Religion of Sinners

A penitent kneels before a priest in a church, representing confession and ritual recovery after sin.
A scene of confession or penance makes the abstract cycle of sin, remorse, confession, correction, and forgiveness easier to understand as a repeated religious practice rather than a demand for spotless purity.

Palmer contrasts this world with later forms of Christianity, especially Calvinist and Puritan traditions, that placed stronger emphasis on purity, discipline, and excluding the stained sinner from the righteous community.

Renaissance Christianity, by contrast, often assumed that even very holy people were sinners. St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most admired saints in Europe, emphasized his own sinfulness and practiced severe penance. The ideal was not a spotless life, but an ongoing cycle:

  • sin
  • remorse
  • confession or penance
  • spiritual correction
  • forgiveness
  • sin again

This did not make sin harmless. It made sin part of a religious system that expected failure and built rituals for recovering from it.

The Patron Saint of Murderers

Saint Julian the Hospitaller serves weary pilgrims, symbolizing repentance through lifelong service after grave sin.
St. Julian serving travelers or pilgrims visually captures the section’s key idea that even a grave sin like murder could lead to a lifelong penitential practice of service.

A striking example is St. Julian the Hospitaller, a saint especially popular in Renaissance Florence. His legend says he was cursed to kill his parents, tried to escape the prophecy, was deceived by the devil, and ended up committing the murder anyway. He then spent the rest of his life trying to repent by serving pilgrims.

That made him the patron saint of murderers: not because murder was trivial, but because even murder could become the beginning of a lifelong penitential struggle.

Modern culture often treats murder as an irreversible identity: once a “m拷r